Monday, July 9

 

 

The weather came and went all morning, switching and changing every thirty minutes. Fortunately the wind stayed calm, even though the clouds scudded across the sky at high speed some of the time.

I had a “shower” which takes a long time at the best of times. I did not count this morning as the best of times since I entered the sauna hut wearing a cardigan and left, thirty minutes later, into a cold wind. I washed all over using buckets and bowls and then cleaned up the pools I had made in the sauna.

Around midday the sun came out and Irma decided that she would do some mowing. She had also noticed the surprising amount of bees in our garden, who seem to arrive to extract pollen from the huge amount of clover flowers covering the area. Irma left islands of clover for the bees so we ended up with a network of freshly mown pathways that we both found ourselves using.

As I wrote this my spell checker kept alerting me to the word mown which it seemed to object to in the sentence above. I googled and The Grammarist told me that:

Mowed is the past tense of the verb mow. For example, if you cut the grass yesterday, you might say, “I mowed the lawn yesterday.” Mown is often used as em>mow’s past-participial adjective. So one might say, “The freshly mown grass looks nice.” But em>mowed is also sometimes used for this purpose. Neither is right or wrong.

In the afternoon I spent a long time reading The Summons, the John Grisham book I found yesterday at lantloppis. The quotes on the cover called it ”compelling” and other similar adjectives. So far I would not call it that. I did find, however, that the structure interested me. It has a single protaganist and the story does not require him to interact with any of the other characters. As I read I thought about this in contrast to the work of writers like Ross McDonald or Robert B Parker. In their books various characters usually hold key pieces of a puzzle, often without knowing it, and through interactions with them the protagonist works through to a conclusion. In this novel something arguably more realistic happens. The plot does not involve any of the characters we get introduced to, at least for the first two hundred and fifty pages, and none of the protagonist’s friends or enemies have anything to do with the main conspiracy.

After a couple of hours of reading I feel compelled to get up and photograph the frog and bicycle in the front. We put them their years ago and left them to slowly sinki into the landscape, which they appear to have managed to do.

At 17:20 we will get dressed up and at 18:00 we will arrive at Riita and Alu’s house. Somewhere down a long path in Lilla Pellinge. Riita went to school with Irma and the two of them have kept in sporadic contact again since Riita and her husband bought a house in Pellinge in 2004. We had imagined that we would stay for our regulation ninety minutes, but instead we will spend three and a half interesting and amusing hours with them and their dog Freya.

We will leave at about 21:30 and drive to get water from an already-closed Benita’s.

Later we will drink two cans of Lidl’s Vodka and Vichy and feel inspired to emulate this the next time we go to a city. We will calculate how much vodka we would need to put in a litre and a half bottle of vichy water to achieve the 5.5% effect the cans have. We will decide that the advantage of this over cider lies in the fact that it contains absolutely no sugar or sweeteners and, once we add fresh mint (of which we have plenty) it tastes delicious.

This decided, we will go to bed.